Thursday, November 08, 2007

Archive

Are you saying Hitler was a biologist?

I’m saying that you’re easily taken in by pseudo-scientia/knowledge and the notion of scientific consensus, therefore if you had lived in Germany when German biologists were preaching the scientific racism of their day you would have supported it based on little more than the “overwhelming numbers” typical to scientific consensus. It takes a severely limited intellect to point to scientific consensus as if it is the equivalent of facts, logic and evidence, yet apparently you’re up to the task.

implying that Genesis is objective scientific evidence shows…

I didn’t say that Genesis is scientific evidence. Apparently you believe that science can answer all questions, ironically that would only show that your grasp of science is poor given that science itself speaks to its limitations.

The objective world is defined by and understood scientifically by observation not a religious text.

Your scientism isn’t born out by science itself. For example, note that the conceptual language of mathematics and geometry on which much of science rests speaks to its own limitations in a systematic way:

Hilbert’s Programme was doomed in that it was unrealizable. In a piece of mathematics that stands as an intellectual tour-de-force of the first magnitude, Gödel demonstrated that the arithmetic with which we are all familiar is incomplete:

…that is, in any system that has a finite set of axioms and rules of inference and which is large enough to contain ordinary arithmetic, there are always true statements of the system that cannot be proved on the basis of that set of axioms and those rules of inference. This result is known as Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem.Now Hilbert’s Programme also aimed to prove the essential consistency of his formulation of mathematics as a formal system. Gödel, in his Second Incompleteness Theorem, shattered that hope as well. He proved that one of the statements that cannot be proved in a sufficiently strong formal system is the consistency of the system itself. In other words, if arithmetic is consistent then that fact is one of the things that cannot be proved in the system. It is something that we can only believe on the basis of the evidence, or by appeal to higher axioms. This has been succinctly summarized by saying that if a religion is something whose foundations are based on faith, then mathematics is the only religion that can prove it is a religion!

(God’s Undertaker: Has Science Buried Godby John Lennox :52)

Every time one introduces Genesis one also by defintion is removing oneself from the scientific argument.

And? Your lack of awareness of the limitations of science that science itself speaks to and lack of focus on pursuing true and total forms of knowledge indicate why you believe in pseudo-science. It’s important to point out that the form of pseudo-knowledge that you derive from your attempts at defining science could easily lead people to deny the truth. For instance, note that if a people incorporated a historical event in their mythology (Perhaps by saying that “gods” came from across the seas born on creatures with huge white wings and a god gave them the gift of agriculture and so on and so forth.) then you’d have us deny it as a matter of principle simply because it was incorporated in a culture’s folklore. (If another civilization had come across the sea on ships with sails/”huge white wings” and so on then you would be denying important historical truths that shaped entire civilizations, technology, etc. And ironically you’d probably have to imagine some pretty inane mythological narratives of naturalism of your own to “explain” things that were actually the result of civilization.)

The natural reaction of those who venerate science and turn it into a creation myth, guide to progress, religion, etc., will be to argue that it somehow an “attack” on science to point out its limitations instead of admitting that science itself indicates its limitations.

It’s also important to point out that wisdom from the mouths of babes and common experience as a sentient being already points to limitations. E.g.

Perhaps a simple illustration will help convince us that science is limited. Let us imagine that my Aunt Matilda has baked a beautiful cake and we take it along to be analyzed by a group of the world’s top scientists. I, as master of ceremonies, ask them for an explanation of the cake and they go to work. The nutrition scientists will tell us about the number of calories in the cake and its nutritional effect; the biochemists will inform us about the structure of the proteins, fats etc. in the cake; the chemists, about the elements involved and their bonding; the physicists will be able to analyze the cake in terms of fundamental particles; and the mathematicians will no doubt offer us a set of elegant equations to describe the behaviour of those particles.Now that these experts, each in terms of his or her scientific discipline, have given us an exhaustive description of the cake, can we say that the cake is completely explained? We have certainly been given a description of how the cake was made and bow its various constituent elements relate to each other, but suppose I now ask the assembled group of experts a final question: Why was the cake made? The grin on Aunt Matilda’s face shows she knows the answer, for she made the cake, and she made it for a purpose. But all the nutrition scientists, biochemists, chemists, physicists and mathematicians in the world will not be able to answer the question — and it is no insult to their disciplines to state their incapacity to answer it. Their disciplines, which can cope with questions about the nature and structure of the cake, that is, answering the ‘how’ questions, cannot answer the ‘why’ questions connected with the purpose for which the cake was made. In fact, the only way we shall ever get an answer is if Aunt Matilda reveals it to us.

And if we quibble over the term science or pull at its definition and limitations all that should happen is that we move on to some of the best truths having to do with the transphysical and symbolic nature of information and communication. If we call such things science or no it matters little, they are true just the same and matter much more to us than the little matter of matter that more limited forms of scientia/knowledge deal with.